Samuelson and Solow published a widely read paper in the May issue of the American Economic Review of 1960. It discussed the causes of inflation, the Phillips curve, and related matters. Discussion of their paper frequently says that it presented the Phillips curve as a stable, exploitable...

The evidence that earnings rise with firm size and that human capital affects earnings based on labour market data are two of the most robust empirical findings in economics. In contrast the evidence for scale economies in firm data is very weak. The limited direct evidence of human capital on...

This paper proposes a measure of financial fragility that is based on economic welfare in a general equilibrium model calibrated against UK data. The model comprises a household sector, three active heterogeneous banks, a central bank/regulator, incomplete markets, and endogenous default. We...

Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) time series models are introduced for the econometric analysis of the dynamics of a large cross-section of prices in which contemporaneous observations are functionally related. A semiparametric FSN model is developed in which a smooth, cubic spline signal...

Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) models are proposed for analysing the dynamics of a large cross-section of yields or asset prices in which contemporaneous observations are functionally related. The FSN models are used to forecast high dimensional yield curves for US Treasury bonds at the one...

Time invariance of factor loadings is a standard assumption in the analysis of large factor models.  Yet, this assumption may be restrictive unless parameter shifts are mild (i.e., local to zero).  In this paper we develop a new testing procedure to detect big breaks in these loadings at...

The class of Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) models is introduced that provides a new, general method for modelling and forecasting time series of economic functions.  The underlying, continuous economic function (or 'signal') is a natural cubic spline whose dynamic evolution is driven by a...

British regions display persistent differences in both earnings and unemployment rates. A number of studies have found that in general, regions that have high unemployment tend to have low wages. This runs contrary to a compensating differentials argument that high wages should compensate for...

Worksharing is considered by many as a promising public policy to reduce unemployment. In this paper we present a review of the most pertinent theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on worksharing. In addition, we also provide new empirical evidence on this issue, by a cross...

We analyse the costs of a monetary union in West Africa by means of asymmetric aggegate demand and aggregate supply shocks. Previous studies have estimated the shocks with the VAR model. We discuss the limits of this approach and apply a new technique based on the dynamic factor model. The...